Hi!
On 15:59 Fri 26 Nov , David Barrett wrote:
> Interesting article:
>
> http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat-on-slow.html
>
> I know a lot of people on this list are interested in this topic. But
> I'm curious: if all sites were to start adopting *ahem* "alternative"
> congestion strategies like this, would would the real-world
> ramifications be? Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that before
> long it'll be a standard Apache option to do what Google does.
The congestion avoidance is broken to begin with. There are not even "deep"
hacks like this needed to attack fairness. What Google does is actually not
that bad either. They do not even increase their "fair share" of bandwidth.
They could/might do this as well, but the article does not give any hint of
this. They just speed up connection "setup". Many users create much more harm
with download managers to download big files over several connections at once.
All of this just shows how badly congestion avoidance scales with so called
long fat pipes (high throughput and high latency).
> Is this the end of the gentleman's internet?
No, I do not think so. You need a backbone which fast enough avoid congestion.
If your backbone is too slow, you either make it faster or limit the user
bandwidth. Relying to congestion avoidance to create fairness will not work.
If you want to do this, replace IP with something which does bandwidth
"allocation" on the routers and not on the edges.
> Should ISPs detect and
> block/throttle this behavior -- essentially punishing (or overriding)
> this type of behavior to re-establish normalcy?
This is very hard. The fairness problem is not just about congestion avoidance
hacks. You would also have to "punish" all applications which have many open
connections or use UDP. This includes not only these download managers, but
also most P2P and server applications, VoIP (UDP streaming), multiplayer
games, web browsers and almost any other application which does anything on
the internet. Moreover without these "abuses" high internet bandwidths will
not even be possible. I would rather say that it is even within the *interest*
of ISPs that people do such hacks, because otherwise they could not even sell
the bandwidths they do today.
-Michi
--
programing a layer 3+4 network protocol for mesh networks
see http://michaelblizek.twilightparadox.com
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